The arms trade is highly controversial and raises difficult policy issues. The controversies tend to concentrate on the moral, military and political dimensions of arms exports decisions. Quite a lot of light can be shed on this murky market by asking basic economic questions and using standard...

There are two main sources of information about the Arms Trade, SIPRI and ACDA. These two sources give very different pictures of the evolution of the market, primarily because their measures are designed to capture conceptually different features. Although they are both expressed in constant...

The possibility of domestic production raises a difficulty for arms export control measures, since embargoes, by raising the effective price of imports, increase the incentive for domestic production. We address this issue by developing a partial equilibrium model of the international arms...

This paper models the determination of the defence industrial base - the number of different military systems a country decides to maintain. High R&D costs means that few countries can afford to produce major weapons systems and the producers also import systems. Non-producers rely on imports...

Multinational arms export control has been the subject of discussion in a variety of fora, from the United Nations through to the Wassenaar group of arms producers. It is widely recognised that free trade in arms can have negative externalities on national security and there are benefits from...

Given that there are a relatively small number of suppliers of major weapons systems, control fo arms exports is possible, and there are a variety of regulatory regimes striving to achieve this. Controls can stabilize regional arms races and reduce tensions. However, when buyers can develop the...